‘May you from this time be cursed with perpetual ill luck!’

Lady Valerie Susie Bruce Meux was a dangerous and designing woman, often treated with unconcealed ridicule and derision. Odd in dress, appearance and behaviour, her speech extravagant, often murdering the English language. Eccentric ways and attractive rudeness were weapons.

‘Oh! You make me ashamed of myself.’

Her beauty was unimpaired and dazzling ... soft brown hair of burnished gold ... nose and mouth perfectly beautiful ... eyes large and soft, a wonderful violet colour, fringed with dark curling lashes, like a child’s. But on her feet, walking, she was grotesque. She wore fantastically highly coloured clothes and hats with great style and bravado ... and dripped jewels and gems in vulgar displays of wealth.

‘Look at my rings.’

Born into a working-class Devonshire family, she became an inhabitant in the London demi-monde, surrounded by rumour, lies, insults and uncomfortable truths, both cursed and cursing.

‘You have had a detective at my back for a long time. I want to save you the trouble by telling you it won’t do any good. He will never catch me tripping. I’m not such a fool as I look. I have caught a baronet and I mean to keep him.’

Hers was a life of Bohemia backed by Mammon. Money was both a pleasure and a weapon. People came wanting money, to start a business, to pay debts, or to start their sons in life. Lady Meux was generous. The bargain clinched. But there was a price to pay. She would behave as she pleased. Pain, punishment and humiliation, outrageously, rejecting everyone before they rejected her.

‘Money ... It means power, you know, of a kind; not that I have much power. I can sign cheques and that is all.’

And yet there are glimpses of a kinder, warmer character, perhaps yearning for a normal family life with children … briefly realised with the adoption of a young girl who mysteriously vanished without trace, unremarked and uncommented on. It remains the biggest mystery of her life about which she remains forever silent.

Whatever people thought of her, everybody agreed that Valerie Meux lived an extraordinary life, but never received the social acceptance she desperately craved, and always denied respectability.

‘You ought to know that I am a woman who is not received. Men come here, distinguished men, but not their women. I am outside.’

This was the woman who was Susan Langdon, Valerie Stewart, Val Reece and, finally, Lady Valerie Susie Bruce Meux.

‘Go! You may blot me out of your memory.’

And we almost did.

Chapters and a little verse

Night Haunts
The Butcher's Daughter
Dancing in the Demi-Monde
The Lunatic and Miladi Anglais
The Secret Marriage
Honeymoon
Down in Dauntsey
Murder? Me?
Arrangements in Disharmony
Bohemia Backed by Mammon
Anarchy and the Red Virgin
Theobalds and the Nest of Sycophants
Temple Bar-Maid
Avoiding the Social Dagger
If It Moves, Kill It
The Worst Possible Taste
The ‘Cursed’ Mummy
Zebra Crossing
The Death of Sir Henry Meux
The Curse of Valerie
The Lark and the Fairy Godmother
Lady Meux’s Club
Lady Dictator and the Beerage
Mr Theobalds and Zee Pet
My Lady of Barbed Wire and Hooked Nails
We Shall Not Budge
The Hero and the Widow
Lady Bountiful and the Reformers
Death and Beyond
Where There’s A Will, There’s Revenge
The Disappearing Heir
Going ... Going ... Gone
Loot: Lady Meux’s Manuscripts
Ameuxments
Legacy

​

'I offer my congratulations, not my stern rebukes,

To one who was Miss Val Rhys, but now is Madame Meux

But on the solemn word of one who says "I knew her slightly,"

'Tis not the first and only time that Val has copped the brewer.'

- John Bennion Booth, London Town, 1929